Then there are the animation cels: Heckle and Jeckle, Dino, Marmaduke, Scooby-Doo, Tom and Jerry, Astro, Tweety Bird, Roadrunner, the Tasmanian Devil, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, Yogi and Boo-Boo. Harold’s mother had gotten rid of a bookcase in order to fill the wall behind it with eight-by-ten framed cels of Deputy Dog, Droopy Dog, Goofy, Hector, Huckleberry Hound, Mr. Peabody, Odie, Pluto, Snoopy, Spike, and Underdog. He feels bad about thinking, “Good God, there goes the goddamn inheritance.” Framed photos of Br’er Fox, Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Terrapin, and Miss Possum line the very top of the wall—all from Song of the South.
He calls Kenny and says, “Hey, man, where are you?”
“I’m on Mr. Reddick’s roof because he has these rats stuck in his gutters running in some kind of race. You ought to see it, man! It’s like a living river of smooth brown hide. It’s like some kind of bizarre stock car race.”
Harold says, “I’m at Mom’s house. You been here lately?”
Kenny says, “If I’d’ve known it was this bad I’d’ve brought a Gatling gun up here with me. You ought to see these things go. Hey, come on over! I ain’t but a mile away.”
“What’s the story with all these photos on the wall? Have you been by here? I don’t know if I can even count as high as how many pictures she has on the wall.”
“Jesus, I’m going to have to go get a flute and see if I can lead these things out of here. Hold on. Let me get down off this roof, which means we’ll probably lose the connection.”
“Did you give her all these pictures? I hope to God that’s the case. Because if it’s not, then we might have a problem.”
“What pictures? Pictures like you look at, or pitchers like you pour tea out of? I might’ve given her one of each. Over time I might’ve given her one of each. I sent her a picture of me and the boys and Dora last Easter in front of that big cave opening.”
Sure enough, they lose their connection.
Harold enters the hallway to find nothing on the walls except finishing nails sticking out a half inch each, apparently in wait for more publicity shots and/or animation cels. He enters his and Kenny’s old bedroom, which appears untouched, then goes to the guest bedroom to find his mother’s laptop turned on and stuck to a page that shows an eBay auction for a Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey cel, at the moment going for $99.99 with three hours left.
“A hundred goddamn dollars? Are you kidding me?” Harold says out loud.
He looks down to an old Calloustown Extermination notepad that his father gave to clients thirty years earlier and reads, “Password—ImNotOld81” and “UserID—Im-NotOld81.”
He locks the side door and places the key back in the conch shell. Harold thinks about going over to the community center and sitting down with Ms. Parks but realizes that—in a small town—sometimes people exaggerate the quirks of the elderly.
So he drives over to the Reddicks’ place to talk to his brother first. Harold passes his mother coming toward him, a mile from his house. He waves at her, but she doesn’t seem to see him. She wears oversized sunglasses handed out at the ophthalmologist’s office, her eyes an inch above the steering wheel.
Harold turns quickly into an old logging road, backs out, and accelerates to catch up with his mother. She drives twenty-five miles an hour, so he meets up with her in a matter of seconds. He flashes his lights. He blows his horn and waves. She doesn’t notice. He veers left and thinks about pulling up beside her on the straightaway. She has a number of dings and scrapes on the back bumper of the 1988 Lincoln Continental, the last model bought by Mr. Lumley after what he labeled the Great Bee and Bat Scare of 1987.
Harold’s phone rings and he picks it up off the passenger seat without looking down. Kenny says, “I figured we’d get cut off.”
“I’m behind Mom right now,” Harold says. “I’m following behind her. I was calling you earlier about her house. When’s the last time you went inside there?”
“I don’t know,” Kenny says. “It’s been a while, now that I think about it. We meet for supper over at that Ryan’s a couple times a week. She can almost eat for goddamn free if we get there by four thirty.”
Harold watches as his mother sticks her left arm out for a turn signal instead of hitting her blinker. He thinks, “She probably thinks it costs money to use any of the electrical system. She’ll spend ten thousand bucks on weird cartoons, but she won’t use her blinker.”
“You want to come on over and meet me at the house? I believe this might be one of those intervention kinds of things that everyone’s talking about all the time. Is she drinking?”
Harold wonders if he’s lost another phone call. He pulls in behind his mother in the driveway. Then he hears his brother going, “Rat in the truck, rat in the truck!” followed by brakes screeching.
In Ruth Lumley’s mind, Harold should’ve taken over the family business. He was older than Kenny by four years, and he had the education and business acumen to turn Calloustown Extermination into a thriving chain throughout the lower piedmont region of South Carolina. But Harold went two states away in order to get an associate’s degree in hospitality and tourism, received a job immediately at a resort down in Myrtle Beach, then turned his back on the entire industry in order to explore the burgeoning world of non-traditional herbs, roots, and panaceas amply supported by a number of medical personalities that provided free advertising daily on the talk shows—something both his ex-wife and mother always deigned snake oil salesman at best. He’d gotten into a conversation with the man who ended up hiring Harold away from Wild Sea Oats Resort and Spa, an entrepreneur of sorts named Bill Will who’d recently diversified from land development into what he explained to Harold as “making up for ruthlessness.” This was at a tucked-away local hangout called He Just Left. They had an all-you-can-eat Fish Sticks Night on Friday, and before Harold needed more tartar sauce he’d become convinced that his destiny involved echinacea, St. John’s wort, and garlic bulb tincture. It involved horny goat extract known as epimedium, though that word reminded him of “epicedi-um,” a word that had to do with funeral dirges that Harold learned in an English class taught by an overeager instructor who insisted on vocabulary memorization. Bill Will said he had a feeling, and hired Harold immediately, right there at the bar. Within a month Harold learned from his own wife Mollyanna that he’d become irresponsible, that he wasn’t thinking about the kids, that a place called Other Medicine didn’t exactly provide his children with unlimited swimming pool usage or free driving range privileges. He learned, too, that she’d been seeing her chiropractor on the sly for over a year.
Parked in her carport, Ruth checks her rearview mirror and says, “What now?”
Harold gets out and approaches his mother’s Lincoln. He bends down at the waist and counts all the dings—seventeen. After his mother closes her door and walks toward him he says, “You sure you should be driving?”
“Don’t make me drive, don’t make me drive! Law, whateber you do, don’ thow me out into duh got-damn macadam!—Hey, I was born on the highway, Harold. Mind your own business.” She reaches her face upward so he can kiss her. “I have never had a ticket or wreck in my life, for your information.”
She smells like alfalfa extract, Harold thinks. She smells like a combination of baby powder, alfalfa, and chicken livers. “Well something’s going on here. Maybe you’re going so slowly down the road that deer are banging into the back of your car.”
She says, “All right. Who died? Why’re you here?”
“You want to go inside?” Harold asks. “Let’s you and me go inside and talk about the community center.” He knows that if she doesn’t let him inside, then she’s trying to hide all of the photographs and cels. If she appears unconcerned about her latest décor, then he might need to worry.
“I’m on my way to the community center right now, goddamn it,” Ruth says. “Move your car, you’re blocking my way.”
“Wait a minute—if you’re going to the center, then why’d you come home a
nd park your car in the carport? That doesn’t make much sense, Mom.”
“It’s a habit I have, that’s all. Don’t you have any goddamn habits that people don’t quite understand? Like having a perfectly great job and leaving it in the dust so your wife leaves you and your children now don’t have much of a college fund because you gave up a hundred K a year for thirty?”
Harold wonders about her blood pressure. He can’t quite tell if she’s red in the face, due to the foundation she wears that must’ve come straight out of a local embalmer’s stock overrun sale. He says, “I’ve already been inside. I’ve seen what you have on the walls. I got summoned here to see what’s going on over where you volunteer with the little migrant workers’ kids or whatever. But now I kind of want to know what’s happened to the kitchen and den walls.”
The mail deliverer pulls in behind Harold’s car and, even though it’s obvious that his appearance is known, he honks his horn. Through the open window he yells, “Hey there, Ms. Lumley, I got you another delivery won’t fit in the box without bending it.” He holds out three flat cardboard boxes.
“Just set them down there, Elwin,” Ruth says.
“On the driveway?”
“Oh, son of a bitch,” Ruth says, stomping toward the mailman. “Here. Do I need to sign anything?”
“No, ma’am. That’s it.”
“Well make sure you’re in reverse this time so you don’t bang into my car again. Or I guess my son’s car. Hell, keep it in drive and ram into his back bumper all you want.”
Harold says to Elwin, “Hey, Mr. Patterson.”
Elwin nods twice, grimaces, and backs out onto the road. Ruth Lumley’s at the door, trying to fish keys out of her pocketbook and get inside so—Harold feels certain—she can lock him out. He runs up to her just as she’s closing the door, gets his hand in, and pulls it back right before she slams his fingers in the jamb. “Go see your brother. Go visit your brother. There’s a rat problem all around here and he could probably use some help.”
“Let me in,” Harold says. He bangs on the door, then presses the buzzer and holds it. Harold thinks, “I should let the air out of her tires.” He thinks, “I can take the battery out of her car and that’ll keep her immobile for a while.” He begins laughing. “Come on, Mom, let me in. I’m having flashbacks of growing up and Dad wouldn’t let me in the house until I hosed out the back of his truck.”
Ruth Lumley doesn’t respond at first. Harold says, “Well, fuck it then,” and goes back to his car. She’ll have to come out of there at some point, he thinks, driving down to Worm’s, a place he’d not entered since high school. A couple beers, he thinks, and I’ll come back when she’s outside practicing her baton, or whatever she does.
He doesn’t hear her yell at the closed door, “They make me remember happier times. Is there anything wrong with happier times?” He doesn’t hear her tear open an envelope and exclaim, “Lamb Chop!”
When he enters the bar, Harold finds Kenny sitting on the first stool. The décor’s not changed since about the time beer companies converted from pull-tabs to flip-tops. Half-naked women on auto parts calendars adorn the walls. There’s a bumper pool table wedged uselessly in a corner, a jukebox that might offer the most selections of Conway Twitty, Ferlin Husky, and Jerry Lee Lewis on the entire Eastern seaboard. “I figured you’d be here sooner or later,” Kenny says.
They do not hug. Worm, whose father went by Worm, says, “See no time long.” He points to Kenny and shrugs his shoulders to Harold.
Kenny says, “That’s enough of that. Worm’s trying to break some kind of record for speaking everything backwards. He wants to be in that book.”
Harold says, “Coldest whatever’s me give,” but it takes him a minute to say it in order.
“To get back to your question, yes, I know all about Mom’s little hobby,” Kenny says.
Harold says, “They never have invented a better-smelling cockroach spray? Man, you reek of that stuff. It’s going to get in your pores, and the next thing you know you’ll be happy you got a brother who knows a thing or three about detoxification remedies.” He says, “I wouldn’t call it ‘little’ hobby, by the way. She must have a hundred framed photos on her walls. It’s kind of creepy. It would make a nice veterinarian’s office, though.”
Worm opens three Tall Boys and sets them on the bar, two in front of Harold and one more for Kenny. He says, “Here.”
Kenny says, “When it first started happening—or when I first learned about it a year or so ago—she said she wanted to start up some kind of museum. She said she wanted to open up the kind of museum people would drive off the highway to go visit. Like those giant balls of string, or giant balls of tinfoil, or giant balls of rubber bands. We was all for it. We could use some visitors, you know.”
Harold shakes his head. He doesn’t smile. He says, “How’s Dora and the kids?”
“Kids’re fine. Dora don’t want me asking Mom much about her museum, seeing as Dora thinks if we bother her too much she’ll evict us from the will. You know what I mean? Dora thinks at least we’ll get a bunch of pictures of Mr. Ed and Lassie when Mom dies, as long as we don’t piss her off none. And Cheetah. Did you know Cheetah just died a month or so ago? He was eighty years old. Mom’s got two signed photos from Cheetah, from the old Tarzan movies.”
Harold stares at his brother but he’s not listening. He wonders if perhaps he should’ve stayed in Calloustown. What if he’d taken over Calloustown Extermination, as was his father’s plan? He’d be living in a regular house somewhere nearby—Kenny made enough money to buy an old farmhouse and a hundred acres he leased out to dove and deer hunters in season—and would’ve probably kept his mother’s dream of an Animal Picture Museum from ever forming.
Worm says, “Back in go to have I,” and waves his right arm out, ending at the cash register, in the international way of letting the brothers know that they’re in charge of retrieving their own cans of beer and putting the money in the cash drawer should they so choose.
Harold says, “I guess there can be worse hobbies. Worse dreams.”
Kenny nods. He finishes his first beer and opens the second. “Sometimes I have to hire out this old boy to help me out, you know. He’s pretty good at cockroaches, fire ants, and termites. Name’s Bobby, but I call him Cool Breeze ’cause I swear to God he comes in and the women around here fall for him so much they got him setting traps for badgers and mongooses in their crawlspaces just so he’ll stick around. His momma ain’t but something like fifty, and she’s already showing signs of crazy, you know? Won’t pay nothing but the minimum on her credit card each month ’cause God told her to be that way. Drives in reverse half the time thinking it’ll turn back her odometer and keep her younger, I guess. Shit like that.”
Harold says, “I miss my kids.” He says, “Sometimes I kick myself for not taking over Dad’s business, so my kids could take over mine. There ain’t no promise they can become an Other Medicine manager just because I’m an Other Medicine manager.”
“It sure makes it easy knowing what to get Mom for birthdays and Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Me and Dora got her one of those publicity shots for that cat that used to do the cat food commercials. I think he’s dead by now. Anyways.”
Harold says, “Has a woman named Berta Parks called you up about her cussing a bunch at little Mexican kids, something about telling off-color jokes about Br’er Rabbit?”
“About Berta Parks cussing a bunch, or Mom cussing a bunch.”
Harold looks at his little brother. He says, “Mom. We’re talking about Mom. Has Berta Parks ever called you?”
“Yeah. She’s called twice. She’s got a bad rat problem too—at the community center, and at home. She called me up twice, and I went out to set out poison and traps both.”
Harold thinks, Now I remember why I got out of my hometown.
Harold leaves his brother at the bar. He puts down money and tells Kenny to hold some cold-pressed sunflower oil under his ton
gue for thirty minutes, then brush his teeth with baking soda in order to detoxify. Harold says, “I’m going back. I don’t want to leave here feeling bad about Mom.” He doesn’t say, “What if she dies and this is my last memory of her?” though he thinks it.
Kenny says, “I got me a sweat lodge I built. That’s how I sweat out the poison.”
Harold wonders what his wife and that chiropractor are doing at the moment. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and he imagines that his children are now home, that his ex-wife is succumbing to an adjustment of sorts. He drives a back road to the house of his upbringing and plans to park up the hill in the direction his mother would never take upon leaving for anything Calloustown had to offer, unless she wished to view a swamp, the town dump, or Mr. Reddick’s nursery that he’d surrounded with a five-foot-high fence made up entirely of grout and liquor bottles.
There, hidden halfway behind a live oak a quarter mile away, he calls his wife’s new house, gets the answering machine, and says, “Hey, kids. I’m in Calloustown if y’all need me, but I got my phone. Can’t wait to see you on Friday.” He forgets to say “I love you,” calls back, but it’s busy. He waits five minutes—his eyes focused on the estuary made up of his mother’s driveway and the ancient asphalt—calls again, but it’s still busy.
Ruth Lumley backs out and points her Lincoln away from Harold.
He lights a cigarette—Other Medicine sells packs of additive-free tobacco products with Bible verses on the flip-tops—squints, pulls down his visor. He turns on the radio to find, as in his childhood, Calloustown only receives a gospel channel clearly. Harold hums along to “It Is Well with My Soul” and wonders how he knows the melody. “Wasn’t there something tragic about the man who wrote this song?” he wonders. “Wasn’t there something about a young son dying, and four daughters lost at sea, and some kind of relentless fire?”
Calloustown Page 19
